I love my mother dearly. She is a pillar of the community, a doer of good deeds, an unfailingly generous parent. But there is one thing on which we have never agreed, and likely never will.

Put simply, my mother is one of those infuriating souls who will happily trundle down the middle of the motorway, for mile after mile, at precisely 67mph, even when the roads are as empty as a Labour manifesto. As such, I know that, to many other road users, she merits her own special circle of hell. And the thing is, I’m not sure they’re wrong.

I appreciate that taking to the pages of a national newspaper to chastise a parent is a drastic, and rather ungallant, step. But between us, my sister and I tried everything else. Indeed, if you think it’s frustrating being behind such a driver, imagine being in the car with them, wracked with shame at the spectacle you must be presenting to other traffic.

It’s probably my abiding memory of childhood driving: the sturdy old Volvo estate going back and forth along the M40, our teenage voices raised in complaint. And set against that, her unvarying insistence that there was a junction up ahead – even if we wouldn’t see it for many, many minutes – so it was far safer to stay in the middle, and avoid hypothetical traffic coming in from the left. The only flaw was that this infuriated the very real traffic coming up from behind, prompting honks and death-stares to which my mother remained oblivious.

Nowadays, this shame expresses itself as a spasm of rage whenever I encounter similar behaviour. So the news that the Government plans to get tough on such middle-lane hoggers filled me with elation. My only quibble with the plans – for £100 on-the-spot fines and three points on the licence –was that they didn’t really seem severe enough: as with high-speed undertaking, a custodial sentence would surely send a more appropriate message.

I started to envisage a second career as an undercover vigilante, the Batman of the motorways. That brown Ford people-carrier squatting in the middle of a near-empty M4 last Sunday afternoon? Instead of fuming all the way to Swindon, I could have whipped out my phone, taken a quick snap of the licence plate, and then placed a call to the Snoopers’ Hotline. True, using a mobile would mean breaking the rules of the road myself, but in service of a higher cause.

From the reaction to the suggestions, it seems I’m not alone. Nothing gets people’s blood up like middle-lane hogging – save, perhaps, for tailgating. Indeed, while I don’t know which genius within the Coalition came up with this idea, I do know that they should embrace the principle more widely.

With money too tight to splurge millions on this or that initiative, politicians could win a lot of cheap popularity simply by imposing draconian crackdowns on truly antisocial behaviour – on those idiots, say, who stand on the left of escalators on the Tube, or fail to move down inside the carriage despite endless requests via the Tannoy, or generally stop the rest of us getting places with their near-bovine reluctance to obey a few simple rules that make everyone’s lives easier.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more a campaign against petty irritations could be the way to see off the threat of Nigel Farage. What better way for David Cameron to prove he’s on our side than to introduce legislation to stop BT charging you £15 a month for a landline that doesn’t even have a phone attached, since you only need it for the broadband connection? Or to ban self-service checkouts unless approved by referendum? It might seem a tad authoritarian, but as anyone who was ever stuck behind a certain blue Volvo will tell you, sometimes extreme measures are the only way to get the point across.